


Raven in the Lean Seasons

by Nemonus



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Recovery, canon-typical self-hatred, canon-typical trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 01:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15037268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Some alternate scenes for Revenant Gun focused on what Cheris was up to during her nine-year absence. The new person she has become decides how best she can fulfill her goal of remaking the hexarcate.





	Raven in the Lean Seasons

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [dreamsatdusk](https://dreamsatdusk.tumblr.com) for beta reading!

Ajewen Cheris watched four episodes of  _ Adventures Among the Glittering Worlds _ aboard the needlemoth. 

She sat with her legs up on the pilot’s console, thoughts idling. The characters were familiar, simple, often associated with particular colors across outfits and seasons. The color theme made them easy to remember, easy to love, easy for her mind to drift as she listened for favorite lines in favorite inflections.

Deciding whether her inner voice had a drawl had proven significantly stressful. Maybe sometimes it did, either when she had relaxed her guard or when she was paying the most attention. Language flitted like ghosts. Sometimes she found herself listening for unfamiliar sounds and catching the Mwennin accent she had erased as a child. Sometimes hex- _ hept- _ hexarchate vowels sounded affected.

How had she sounded when she tried to make Cheris drop the luckstone? He, the Jedao who was part of her, considered lazily whether the intimidation was attractive to her or to him in repetition in memory. Some preferences had bled in. Did she want to be powerful or powerless? The snap of a button on the collar of a uniform, full formal.

Cheris-Jedao marched, carefully stepping with her stride balanced in the way most comfortable to a womanform. She left the bathroom door open when she threw up. No one would come in to see her. She hadn’t eaten in too long and reminded herself to ask one of the servitors if it could spare some time to bring her broth or tea, something easy, to replace what she had lost.

Ajewen Cheris watched twelve episodes of  _ Adventures Among the Glittering Worlds _ aboard the needlemoth.

* * *

In this episode, the heretical mercenaries had taken captive numerous children. They were held in a hovertruck, wide-eyed and silent, while an elderly man told them solemnly and ominously the new rules they would be required to obey and enforce. The heroic factionless engineer, clinging to the side of a building in a catsuit and strangle-tight gun-belts, scowled her noble scowl. 

Cheris tipped her wrist to look at the watch Khiruev had given her, wondering when the servitors would see fit to introduce her to Pyrehawk Enclave’s representative. 1491625 had left her here with a polite but warningly direct instruction not to leave the needlemoth until her message had cleared. It was either an extraordinary formality or patronizing for the servitor to have to specify, and she spent some time determining whether it was worth the effort to survey the Pyrehawks’ past delegations to determine which was more likely. She had already traced a wake through servitor activity to discover the existence of the enclaves, and was determined not to overstep her welcome any further.

She did not mind the small size of the needlemoth, which was currently docked at a splinter group’s station. There was no need for additional passengers, and having rations in a drawer in the room she used every day helped her remember to eat.

The hard part was the silence. She had muted the drama to be sure to hear the servitor when they entered, and there was still that … she would not call it/him/herself a tic. There was still that drawl, no less unsettling because it was controllable. Sometimes she forgot which accent she was supposed to be changing. It was a confusion of language, a confusion of base systems. Nonsense equations written in sand.

There was a bump on the inside of her mouth that she had been biting. Did she make the initial wound herself? How many methods had she been trying to hurt herself in small ways without noticing? She had started thinking about Khiaz as soon as she trusted herself with a gun. Maybe the hatred had just transferred from one self-hating behavior to another.

Jedao’s emotions were vicious but manageable. She had always managed them before. Sometimes he was a presence hanging over her shoulder, carrion glass embedded in void-skin. Sometimes he was herself, a soul she wore like her own bones.

A deltaform scooted into her room.

Cheris stood, and pulled intentionally at the back of one of her half-gloves. It helped to remind people who they were dealing with.

“The Pyrehawk Enclave would like to know why we should trust a human to learn our codeways,” said the deltaform.

The sudden question was a surprise, but she was not unprepared. An interview consisting of one exchange could be very easily won or very easily lost. Along with the self-hatred, Jedao’s memories had given her an understanding of the rush of a gamble he knew he could win. Plans work, Cheris-Jedao muttered silently, trying to believe it and believing it fully at the same time.  _ What you speak becomes reality. _

“I have two reasons,” she said, and dropped her hands to her sides. “First, the arrangement of my new calendar is key, but I will not forget what servitors have done for me before and after my plan began. I understand that it will be difficult to negotiate a new relationship between servitors and the hexarcate: so much of what you do for us is unspoken, and right now I stand poised to offer all sorts of insult by accident. I’m coming to your high table ungloved and missing one shoe besides, and I acknowledge that. Instead of fumbling along in a misguided attempt to free you, I want to renegotiate with as much transparency as possible.”

The deltaform’s lights glowed wordless, alert acknowledgement. Cheris did not doubt that it was transmitting to at least one other member of the enclave.

“Second, I believe you are already aware that I am a bad and persistent enemy. My actions in the Swanknot were far from harmless, but the servitors who completed that mission for me did so by choice. They were …” She struggled for the appropriate word, in any language, and settled for an archaic high language variant. “Volunteers. Had I treated them badly, you would have known.”

Appeal to their passive observation network, sprinkle in a taste of intimidation, and tie it all together with honesty. The honesty needed to be the dominant part. She waited. The drama kept silently playing in the background.

The deltaform flashed one word in Machine Universal. “Yes.”

Cheris smiled a crooked smile.  _ Sometimes, plans work. _

* * *

Years of research, years of formulas and rewriting calendrical months and weeks, years of equations that strung the planets together. Years of seeing who the other people in the hexarchate were: factionless farmers who reminded her of her parents, and craftspeople, crowded in ghettos, who reminded her of her parents. She stayed apart from people, sometimes missing Khiruev and Brezan terribly and sometimes enamored enough with the colors of the world to feel crowded even when she was alone. She had starved for color once, begged for any kind of relief from black glass and tolling black bells. When she wasn’t working, meditation was easy.

Between servitors and her own shining, intricately interlocked calculations and hints to servitors within Brezan’s new Kel, she began dragging the universe around by the ears.

Several times, she expected to find Nirai Kujen hiding in a fortress and found empty rooms instead. Sometimes, she had to tell herself that she was in fact Ajewen Cheris, to remind her why she kept going. Her mission wasn’t all about opening up old wounds. It was also about changing the hexarchate, creating a system where people didn’t need to be cut up on holidays any more, their mouths stuffed quiet with other people’s prayers.

Being Jedao, she spent some time making sure the needlemoth’s supplies were variously colored and clearly labeled. Being Cheris, she rubbed her luckstone between her fingers.

She had considered early on that because she could remember being Jedao’s anchor from both perspectives, she would think of her situation as the anchor having held her ‘base’ memories and Jedao’s had been pinned onto them with carrion glass, instead of the other way around. She remembered feeling a spectrum of hatreds for him, fear and frustration and admiration all together. He remembered blending her senses together, making her think his shadow had grown and the rest of the room retreated. She remembered firing the chrysalis gun in her quarters, nothingshot splashing against mothwalls as mouths opened in her shadow.

“I’m done,” he had said, as if it had been an exercise. “It’s over,” he had said, realizing he had formationkicked her harder than he had meant to. (She understood now the twisted, terrible luxury of  _ unintentional _ cruelty, and vowed never to be complacent toward either kind.)

Well, she had understood, thought Jedao.

Well, he had done nothing that had not been done to him, thought Cheris.

Sometimes she stood in the cramped shower and became baffled by her body. Sometimes she startled at the mundanity of her shadow.

Other times, she felt that the ninefox gaze had been tattooed on her spine and lended her strength of a kind she had never possessed.

When she was lonely she watched dramas, avoiding the ones about herself.

* * *

Two meetings. Two more, and then she could begin her third work and, for the first time in nine years, figure out what it meant to her that Nirai Kujen was dead.

The man built from her memories and a moth was a monster. She had savored pulling the trigger on him, savored the strange bloodlessness of the wounds, chided herself gently for savoring the look of shock in the oh-so-familiar eyes. He was a monster, but he had also been so terribly used. What did a blank slate of a mind in the hexarchate give you? An innocent who Kujen helped turn into a monster. Of course it did. That was the machinery of Kujen’s regime, and Cheris bet it would be repeated over how ever many hypothetical experiments one might do. (The experiments had already been done in the real world, of course, because this was Kujen.)

She wanted to wrap her arms around herself, around both of her selves.

Instead, she sat in the small office Brezan had nervously assigned to her and waited for a call from Shuos Mikodez.

When it came she saw that the hexarch’s body language was not as designed to frighten as usual. He sat back behind his desk, his forelock draped to the side of his bright eyes. (Alert or glazed? How long had he been awake?) The green onion usually present on his desk was gone, not a dot of dirt left in its place.

“Hexarch,” she said.

His mouth quirked. “Cheris. I shall have you know that this meeting is not my priority.”

“Lives haven’t historically been for either of us.”

“Uncommonly cold as usual. Jedao was worried about the troops on the butchermoth after you all left it such a mess. I think he will be a good teacher for all of us.”

_ Like a blank document _ , Cheris thought, but suppressed the bile. She didn’t need to worry about whether Mikodez would notice the expression on her face.  _ Her  _ Jedao had very good control.

“I won’t hurt him,” she said, and meant it.  _ Not again. _

“It’s not me you need to reassure.”

She waved a full-gloved hand. “Maybe one day.”

“Stop being stuck-up for … as long as you can manage. I don’t look forward to working with you either, not while we’re still negotiating what a new calendrical system looks like. But I think we both agree it means less torture. I want Jedao and Zehun to reform the Shuos. And I want you to help them. I don’t care whether it takes you ten years to be willing to stand in the same room.”

She took a deep breath. 

“You’ll be paid, and be assigned an orbit of priority around the Citadel of Eyes,” said Mikodez. “I don’t imagine you want to stay on board.”

“Your imagination is profoundly accurate.”

“That’s because I don’t have much of one, actually. I’ll set you up a line to Zehun. Don’t expect it always to be open.”

“I understand.”

She wondered whether the other Jedao would remain a prisoner. Which of them was more constricted? She wasn’t powerless, though — she had the servitors on her side, which gave her a direct line to moth crews. She had heard that the clone had some interesting ideas about liberating moths and writing up a curriculum for their language, though. Maybe one day she would want to talk to him about that.

Mikodez signed off without saying goodbye.

_ While we’re still negotiating what a world without organized ritual torture looks like. _ Nirai Kujen was dead. Cheris laid her hands flat on her desk and took another meditation breath, imagining kaleidoscopic colors dancing on the white wall.

She smiled.  _ Thank you, Shuos-zho. _

Her next meeting would be less fraught … probably, as long as Brezan’s brief reference to Khiruev’s continued service was accurate. She had decided to hold the first conversation remotely, both because she was afraid and because she feared it would be difficult to end the visit if they were in the same place. Khiruev, like precious and ancient Rho, felt like safety.

_ Hey, _ she typed.

Writing felt comfortable, like writing a game she knew would trip players up. No — it was like writing a game she suspected players would enjoy.

**What do I call you now?**

_ Khiruev, you can call me any names you like and I’ll treasure them. I couldn’t reach out to you until all this was over. _

Khiruev was typing. Cheris fidgeted.

**Crashfox? I’m sure there’s all sort of interesting slang for you.**

_ I missed you. _

Cheris felt a cold, ambitious hate for the system, the one that made every desire either a command or a heart-deep weakness. Formation instinct wouldn’t override anyone soon, and Khiruev had surely changed over the last years, but there was also time for both of them to figure out what they wanted their new relationship to be.

**I missed you too, Cheris.**

Khiruev paused. Cheris was glad of it; she had needed her to.

Then:  **Can you come visit? I’m not about to ask you where you are because I’m not sure it wouldn’t be redacted anyway. Gotta have some security in the new, free, whatever we’re calling this. I can tune up that watch. But if you’re …**

_ Khiruev, _ Cheris wrote with steady hands,  _ I can go anywhere I want. _

They planned to rendezvous on one of the remaining stations, in a region of space where mothdrives were reasonably expected to work. They talked for a while, about Khiruev’s workbench and Cheris’ increasing fluency in Machine Universal, and about whether the new calendar could include effects to make rations less dry. When they signed off, Cheris felt energized. Her own personal calendar had rearranged, gravity strong around the day and time the two would meet.

Cheris leaned back into the arms of her blind shadow. Next she would need to call Oru, and make arrangements to visit the Mwennin colony she was working in. Cheris had her own curriculum to work on. Helping the Mwennin would keep her hand in math and warm the part of her which missed the language she had rejected. It was a small part, but it persisted.

_ Sometimes, plans work. _

She would not go to the colony herself, not when she had worked too hard and gone too far to ever return to the day-to-day lives of her people. That didn’t mean those things weren’t worth doing, though. She would help Mikodez and the Mwennin, and maybe one day she would enrich some fraction of the number of lives she had taken. It wasn’t penitence, not exactly. Maybe it was second rebirth.


End file.
